Information users and workers gather and process enormous amounts of information for business, education, and pleasure. Typical information users or workers utilize hundreds (or more) of documents, images, electronic communications, data sets and the like. In addition, a typical information user or worker gathers and/or consumes equally large amounts of information through a variety of search mechanisms, for example, file or data search applications, Internet browsing applications, and the like.
In a typical enterprise setting, an information user/worker may work with a number of different persons on a number of projects, each being associated with many documents and other content items. The information user/worker may have different and sometimes complex relationships with the various people, for example, manager-to-report, peer-to-peer, etc. Other types of relationships between people (users) are manifested in social and collaborative connections, for example, electronic communications between people, collaboration on content items (e.g., documents) between people, social commentary and communication between people, and the like. Other types of relationship information for a given user may include relationship information between the user and documents or other content items. For example, various content items may be created, edited and/or viewed by the user, or various content items may be created, edited and/or viewed by other people with whom the user has a relationship, including a person-to-person relationship or a person-to-content item relationship.
According to a typical search mechanism, a user may be able to search on a person or content item, and a flat list of information may be returned that may include a person or item of interest, but may not surface a person or content item to the user of particular interest or relevance to the user. That is, the user may have to parse a list of returned search results for one or more people or content items to find a person or content item that is responsive to the search.
There is a need for query suggestion that provides searching suggestions to a user for searching or navigating to one or more people of particular importance or relevance to the user and for providing suggestions for allowing a user to search or navigate to content items associated with actions or activities of a given person, including the user.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.